Dying Light is a first person survival horror developed by Techland and is going to be released on Xbox-360, Xbox-One, PS3, PS4 and PC for 2014.
Dying Light is set in a massive open world set in urban areas during a zombie outbreak.. The gameplay video is played in a rundown urban area, your player has a wide variety of free-running skills to avoid zombies and other dangerous humans. The amount of work put into the free-running aspects are on par with Mirrors Edge, potentially better. During the day, the zombies are more docile unless you enter their proximity. However during the night they’re much more aggressive and will give chase. You can’t always rely on your free-running to avoid a troublesome confrontation, you’re capable of crafting weapons to decimate the zombies as they can grab you as you’re running. The weapon customisation is quite like Dead Island, you can have an electric blade which reminded me of it. There appears to be a wide variety of weapons from a bat, axe, throwing weapons such as knives and being able to add aliments such as electricity to some of them, but would you want to be using them when you have awesome free-running skills at your disposal. If you’re grabbed your character will break the neck of the zombie grabbing you, that appears to only happen when one zombie is present, if more come, you’re done. So when in combat you have to decide what you’re going to do, run or fight?
Your classic, slow and idiotic zombie doesn’t exist in Dying Light, during the night it becomes completely different, you aren’t able to run around as freely as the hunters awaken and you need to use an ability called “Night Sense” to avoid confrontation. However if you are seen you need to flee as you’ll find yourself overrun, if you think you’re getting away your able of looking behind you in slow-motion so you can take your time to observe what is happening instead of getting yourself killed because you ended up running into a wall because you looked for too long. If you’re having trouble on the ground, your capable of running on rooftops and even inside the buildings themselves to get past a certain situation. I have already mentioned how zombies aren’t slow and will chase you, there are hunters which appear during the night to prey upon humans and a large zombie which charges at you with immense power. The characters seem to make the hunters the most dangerous of the lot as they’re probably more agile and powerful.
The story of Dying Light is quite unknown at this point so assumptions can only be made. It seems you’re a free-runner working for a group of people to pick up supply drops from an unknown source so you can survive. But this is when the human enemies are put in as it’s a race to see who can get there first. During your missions you may have an event occur in the open world, such as saving a child from her infected father. You can ignore it and collect the supply drop, or save a child which is about to be killed by her infected father. All of these decisions will impact you later on in the game as it’s said that the game reacts to what you’ve done. This may appear to be a hard game, but that’s what a survival horror is all about. When I hear a new zombie game is coming out, I worry that it’s going to be the same formula over and over, but I’m pleased that there are original ideas still coming through.
